Take 2. FRIDAY'S GUIDE TO MOVIES & MUSIC. Movie review.

`Crumb' A Chillingly Intimate Look At An Underground Legend

Remember "Fritz the Cat," "Mr. Natural," "Keep on Truckin' " or "The Snoid from Sheboygan"? What about the cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company's "Cheap Thrills"?

If you're over 40, that's probably a silly question. All those hilarious, hideous characters and creations--and Robert Crumb, the great, vulgar, American cartoon artist who brought them pungently to life--are as embedded in many '60s survivors' memories as the Beatles' "Hey Jude" or Janis Joplin's "Ball and Chain."

Crumb's comics, as central to their times as Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" was to the '40s and Walt Kelly's "Pogo" was to the '50s, go, satirically, far beyond either. (Far enough for serious art critics to compare him to Pieter Bruegel and George Grosz.) Descended from the "Funny Animal" style of Kelly and Carl ("Uncle Scrooge") Barks, Crumb's goofily distended and brilliantly detailed comic drawings define and capture their era--its dopiness, terrors, excesses and banalities--like almost nothing else.

And the splendid new documentary "Crumb," a sympathetic yet woundingly candid portrait, catches the artist with much the same skill. It's grotesque but true, funny but sad, weirdly exaggerated but achingly real.

We see a comics master here as perhaps no one would really like to see themselves on screen: unfiltered, from the good and bad angles. Directed by Crumb's longtime friend and collaborator, Terry Zwigoff--who published some of his comics and played with him in Crumb's antique string band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders--this movie seemingly gets as close to its subject as is possible.

"Crumb" catches a whole place and time by focusing on a group of people who seem terminally estranged from it: Robert and his talented but dysfunctional artist brothers Charles and Max. By baldly but lovingly confronting Crumb's special creepiness--his Snoid-like grin; his defiant, Thrift Shop, crumpled-hat-and-glasses image; his sometimes shockingly hostile fantasies about women; and his fouled-up family and childhood--Zwigoff stays true to his subject.

All the eccentricities eventually emerge as genuine artistic alienation. We see this most powerfully through Crumb's family: the three sensitive brothers who were isolated from most of their schoolmates and subjected to a brutal crossfire between their Marine father Charles Sr. and their supportive but amphetamine-addicted mother Beatrice.

In this O'Neill-like family horror story, witty-yet-defeated Charles Crumb Jr., Robert's older brother, is the tragic figure. A highly gifted artist, Charles' obsession with drawing comics pushed Robert into his career. Yet here, Charles is shown in a funny-awful cul-de-sac: unemployed, living in a kind of perpetual semi-squalor with his mother.

As we watch this--as we watch everything, including the hippie-dippy merry-go-round of Robert's Haight-Ashbury years--Crumb's raucous laughter temporarily obscures the pain. We see how the jubilant, anarchic '60s were a reaction to the hidden horrors of the decades before. We see why the carnival couldn't last. And we also see why Crumb's "let it all hang out" artistic philosophy--a natural '60s viewpoint--can seem monstrous to some in the more careful '90s.

There's something very sad echoing though "Crumb": a melancholy absurd bond with the past, symbolized as much by the contemporary Crumb's refusal to get a color TV as by his oddball revelation of childhood crushes on Bugs Bunny (at age 6) and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (at 12). Crumb's signature characters may sometimes have had preposterously self-satisfied grins, as their outsize feet trucked them down the street. But they also were often deep in anxiety and gloom, quivering with panic. The movie gets both sides, shows why they're as eternally joined and symbolically complete as Crumb's own Cute, Adorable Little Bearzy Wearzys.

Depressingly, this terrific documentary, one of the best from America in several years, is another gem rejected by a group that sometimes appears even more dysfunctional than the Crumb family: the Motion Picture Academy's Documentary Committee. (Not only did they refuse "Crumb" an Oscar nomination, they gonged it before the screening was over.)

Wrong again. In a way, the committee's incomprehension (Did they find the film too icky?) is a badge of honor. "Crumb" unflinchingly shows the dark side, both of Crumb and the world he passed through. It mounts a powerful case for Crumb's brilliance and centrality as a visual artist--and proves it.

It also nails its time and era with Crumb-like wit and candor. Perhaps most great humor has its roots in this kind of profound sadness or horror, in things that wouldn't be funny if we viewed them from a slightly different angle. Certainly that's true of "Crumb." To get the joke, you have to feel the pain.